Product Life Cycle

Product Life Cycle

AED-SICAD Product Life Cycle Support Policy

This document outlines the four different Support phases of AED-SICAD’s Product Life Cycle. AED-SICAD synchronizes support life cycle changes with the correlating Esri ArcGIS version life cycle. This information is intended to help you develop your product plans including migration and transition strategies with the knowledge and understanding of our Product Life Cycle Support plans.Note: The Product Life Cycle Support Policy does not impact a user’s right or ability to use any of the software products; it only applies to support availability.

Product Life Cycle Support: Four phases

General Availability

Phone support

Email, FAX

Online support center

Provision of new functionality and bug fixes

New environment certification

Extended Support

Phone support

Email, FAX

Online support center

Provision of bug fixes

No certification

Mature Support

12 months

No longer available for purchase

Phone support

Email, FAX

Online support center

No bug fixes

No certification

Retired

No phone support

No Email/FAX support

No online support

No bug fixes

No certification

Phase 1: General Availability

A product is in General Availability phase as soon as it is released to ship.

General Availability products are the currently shipping products.

General Availability products are fully supported.

Support includes:

Support by phone / fax / email between 09:00 and 17:00 (GMT-1) Monday through Friday - EU only. (International users need to contact their local distributors)

New environment certification – when a major new release of an operating system, database, or web browser is released during the General Availability phase of an ArcFM UT product, AED-SICAD will test this new environment with the General Availability release.

We encourage users to begin all new projects with General Availability products and to migrate existing applications to these products as soon as possible.

Phase 2: Extended Support

The Extended Support phase usually starts for a product previously in the General Availability phase three months after a new major release of the product becomes generally available.

For example, ArcFM UT 9.2.2 transitioned to the Extended Support Phase at least three months after ArcFM UT 9.3 started shipping.

The three months overlap takes into account the shipping time for a new release. It takes about three months for the majority of our users worldwide to receive a new release.

Once a product enters Extended Support, a user can expect the following support:

Support by phone / fax / email between 09:00 and 17:00 (GMT-1) Monday through Friday - EU only. (International users need to contact their local distributors)

Provision of bug fixes when warranted. New software functionality is only provided if its absence is avoiding production

AED-SICAD will not certify new environments for products in this Extended Support phase.

If an existing customer is contemplating migrating their environment then they should also consider an ArcFM UT product migration as appropriate.

Customers with products in the Extended Support phase are encouraged to start planning their migration to a General Availability product.

Products will leave the Extended Support Phase in general, when a new major realease is available or by official announcement.

Phase 3: Mature Support

The Mature Support phase starts when the Extended Support phase ends. As a general rule, an Extended Support phase product moves to the Mature Support phase when a new major release of the product becomes available or by an official announcement.

For example, once ArcFM UT 9.3 began shipping, ArcFM UT 9.2.2 releases entered Extended Support and the ArcFM UT 9.2.1 releases entered the Mature Support phase.

This general rule does not apply to all products. In particular, products that do not have frequent updates may enter the Mature Support phase even when no new version has been released.

Once a product enters Mature Support, a user can expect the following support:

Support by phone / fax / email between 09:00 and 17:00 (GMT-1) Monday through Friday - EU only. (International users need to contact their local distributors)

Online product support (www.aed-sicad.com: SUPPORT)

AED-SICAD will not provide new software functionality nor any further new software builds for patches and quick fixes for products that have reached the Mature Support phase. New environments will not be certified for Mature Support phase.

The Mature Support phase will last 12 months from date of announcement unless otherwise stated at announcement time to provide users with enough time to migrate their environment.

Customers with Mature Support products should be actively migrating their applications to General Availability products.

Phase 4: Retired

After 12 months in the Mature Support phase or at the time previously announced, a product will be retired and enter the Retired phase.

Users will no longer have access to technical support through direct phone, fax, or email request.

Online product information on our website may be deleted and users won’t get any product information via RSS-Feeds or newsletter.

No provision of new software functionality and bug fixes# and AED-SICAD will not certify any new environment.

Typically, older products in the Retired phase will not work correctly under new environments.

AED-SICAD will not make any attempt to determine whether a Retired product will work in a new environment or to actually make it work in a new environment.

Customers with products in Retired phase should migrate their applications to General Availability products immediately.

UT for ArcGIS Product Life Cycle Support Status

The Product Life Cycle Support Policy is designed to help communicate to UT for ArcGIS users the technical support resources available during a product's life span and to provide advanced notification of planned changes to available support options. Read more about this in our Product Life Cycle Support Policy.Notes:

All software build numbers available for a particular version have the same support status as the version they address.

Bug fixes for a given version are always provided as a new build (which might contain a number of consistent corrections). In exceptional cases patches will be extracted project-wise from a build containing a given bug fix. All customers are encouraged to update their version to the newest build in the version line by need.

Certain builds in a released version line containing either important corrections or a significant amount of small corrections will be labeled as Service Packs and actively distributed to customers using that version while in General Availability or Extended Support.